I am not a big fan of the first example. If all that a function is doing is pasting its argument into a template string, then I’d rather see that pattern expressed explicitly in a single line of code than have to mentally infer this pattern myself by reading two separately expressed cases in six lines of code.

(It’s not that big of a deal, but when reading through a lot of code to figure out what is going on, these little extra mental exertions start to really add up.)

ACK

I prefer RAID -1, which is like RAID 0 except that you routinely yank one of the drives so that only the fittest of the bits survive, greatly improving the quality of your data!

Did you actually read the article? They have clearly been putting a lot of thought and care into this project.

Yeah, I really enjoyed the central conceit of that movie, which is that it is really fun to watch Tom Cruise die over and over again.

When I see phrases like “re-thinking” and “another point of view”, I am led to believe that I will be reading about something relatively new. Instead, there not anything new here, and on top of that the person writing the article seems to barely understand the concepts involved. Finally, their English is so poor that the article is really hard to read.

Yeah, and it had more tangents then an infinitely differentiable curve.

But that might be seen as being in the spirit of C++

One might even say that this is another instance of the same template.

Hey now, you should be thanking your teachers for this incredibly valuable early life lesson on the difference between what the customer says that they want and what they actually need, and which of these two you are going to get paid more for!

Remember: the customer is always right!

/s

Could someone point me to a more in-depth legal analysis of this bill? The text of it is here. It looks to me like it is mostly about replacing vague parts of the U.S. code with regards to patents with more explicit instructions, and one of these instructions even seems to give courts explicit permission to judge whether an invention is eligible for a patent rather than taking this power away:

IN GENERAL.—In an action brought for infringement under this title, the court, at any time, may determine whether an invention or discovery that is a subject of the action is eligible for a patent under this section, including on motion of a party when there are no genuine issues of material fact.

Furthermore, one really nice thing that this bill does is that it makes it clear that if the invention or discovery solely involves a process or material occurring naturally with no modification–a human gene being explicitly called out–then it is explicitly ineligible for a patent.

To be clear, though, I am not a legal expert, which is why it would be great if someone would provide an in-depth analysis of exactly where the problem is rather than just saying that the bill is bad.

I disagree that the web site is fast; it took at least 10 seconds before the video would start playing.

I feel like the modern name for it would be just “Script”.

Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there’s literally no way you can write pure Python that’s 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there.

Completely agreed, but it can be surprising just how often C++ really is written that inefficiently; I have had multiple successes in my career of rewriting C++ code in Python and making it faster in the process, but never because Python is inherently faster than C++.

Sure, but if you are not regularly expressing code that has the potential of summoning elder gods that will swallow your soul into a dimension of ceaseless screaming then are you really living?

I don’t always use regular expressions, but when I do, I use it to parse XML,

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

I tried reading the article and gave up because life is too short for me to read a tiresome article making points that aren’t even particularly that new.

Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.

Every one had already been launched.

All of these options are still better than spending full price for a pair of jeans that were lovingly crafted to start with holes in them!

Easy: recognizing bird calls on my phone.